Siobhán Donaghy. This is the title song of her second album. Don't hold it against her that she's an ex-Sugarbabe. She's gone solo for almost a decade now and I applaud that she took the road where she can make the songs she wants to make.

I must admit, this is the only one I really really liked, from the ones that I listened to online. Just because it is a bit experimental and has some backwards production trickery, lyrics that are more random words than anything and just a bit fun.

I've always liked the name Siobhán, which is an Irish given name. I don't know why. It's a bit odd (I don't mean this in an offensive way), because it is written differently than it's pronunciation: /ʃəˈvɔːn/ shə-vawn.

I had once seen a sitcom on the BBC, where Siobhan Hayes played a character with the same given name. It has stuck in my head ever since. I just looked her up on the net but the sitcom doesn't feature on her wiki-page. It wasn't anything great, so I can imagine it was a one season thing. Hayes is know also from the BBC sitcom My Family where she plays Abi Harper.

If you've never seen or heard about My Family, I invite you to look them up. They are fun, though the early series are the best ones to me.

If you didn't know, I was referencing Winnie The Pooh in my title just there.

I thought, hey, how cool is that! A tag cloud! I must have one too. It's round, it moves all directions, it's hypnotic...

But as with all things technological and complex, things usually only work half way with me. I'm pretty much used to it. Being pessimistic and karma and all, I do not trust when technology works from the word go with me.

Chaos reigns.

I don't know if you saw "Antichrist" by Lars von Trier. There is an awfull scene in it, where Willem Dafoe finds a fox in the grass field of a forest, eating ... *I'm not telling* -well I'll leave that for you to see if ever you see this movie, will not spoil the disgust just yet - and the fox turns its head towards Dafoe, saying the words in a low evil voice: "Chaos reigns".

I do believe it reigns. I admit to being very much so a person who likes to be in control of things. I think that is also why I do the job I do. I never actively, during my studying years, deliberately looked or worked up to this job. Yet, I have found myself having done these studies and doing this job. You can even say it is an asset, wanting to be in control over things, when doing my job. And in an ideal world, I could be very happy and satisfied.

Ideal worlds don’t exist. It would be naïf to think so. And egocentric to think things can always go my way. I just find it difficult to deal with chaos. With irregularity. I can take them, sure, but in small doses.

My need for control, my need for being prepared, being organized, is maybe a way of comforting me. Do I need comforting for something? I don’t know. Do I possess a need for power? Because is a need for control not the same thing? Having power over what is and will come? I don’t know.


My heart is beating faster. I’m irritable. My stomach hurts. My attitude is very cold and I have a temper with people. These are things I experience when chaos reigns over me. I hate it when I am like that. I see myself being like it and I don’t recognize that person. I've, up till some time ago, been a calm person. A kind person. Now I am continuously experiencing anxiety. I hate it.

Today is Monday. Will this chaos reign over my week? Probably. I just looked at my calendar and it looks like I need to find Tranquility to usurp chaos quickly in order to survive this week.

Oh how I would love to have just one weekday, where I come in and the things I planned out can follow its due course. The schedule respected, the instructions clear and concise, and given to me with due respect. How lovely that would be. Is that wishful thinking? Isn’t that how in ordinary days things ought to proceed?

Ordinary. People don’t like ordinary days. Always on the lookout for extraordinary. And in a sense, I do too. I know that is contradictory, seeing I’m a control freak, seeking stability and order. Repetition is no fun. If you don’t change and evolve, you die. Well maybe not literally, but you get the point. What I am getting to is that I need a balance of both. I need things I can count on as much as I have the need to experience the unexpected.

It’s just the unexpected and continuously changing of things and promises, on a daily basis, I cannot deal with. For me, that’s chaos. And that is just not what I need in life.

I cannot begin to say where my disappointment begins or ends. (In my defence, I only went to this movie with a friend, not for my own interest.)
Why on Earth does anyone think a remake was needed from the 1980's one? And secondly, there is no edge to this, there was an edge to the '80s movie. Was this made by Disney or something? Very naive. I'm not waisting any more words on this remake.

The Return is a Russian movie by Andrei Zvyagintsev, about two brothers, who live with their mother and only know their father from an old photograph. He has come back and is taking them for a 2 day fishing trip. Only it doesn’t turn out that way. During the several phone calls he made during the road trip, he gets one that obligates him to take on a mysterious job for 3 days on some island. At first, he puts the boys on a bus on their way home, but he changes his mind and takes them with him anyway.

The relationship between the boys and the father is not a good one. After several years of absence, that comes as no surprise. He is very harsh with them, especially with the youngest, Ivan, who is more defiant and reluctant in following his father than his brother Andrey is.

It is clear that the two boys see the return of the father differently. They seek his approval, Andrey especially by doing what his father tells him, to show he's a man. And though in some way Ivan does as well, he is weary of the reason of the return. Because why is the man so hard on them? He is tough and harsh and expects that his sons treat him with the respect of a father, while to Ivan, he is just a man who suddenly says he's their father.

The defiance of Ivan, especially by manipulating his brother to be disobedient to their father when he puts Andrey in charge while they go off fishing, results in a culminating power struggle of the mind between Ivan and his father. Ivan, though wanting to be a man, reacts like the boy he in fact really is and this leads to a dramatic event.

A very enjoyable movie. Love the camera on this one, the images, and the story (even though it is quite dramatic). Even the music really gives weight to the whole picture.

Only I found out 2 eerie things after reading some info on Wikipedia: well for one, that the director also had a “return” of his absent father when he was 6. I don’t know if the movie is entirely autobiographical (hope not). The second thing is that the young actor who played the eldest son Andrey, Vladimir Garin, drowned not long after shooting ended, in a lake near where the movie’s ending was shot. Gave me goose bumps that one.

You can find a trailer below. It is dubbed in English. I saw the movie in Russian with subtitling. Unfortunately, I did not find any to post here. It was either English or Russian, but none subtitled.

District 9 is a South African Science fiction movie. Produced by Peter Jackson.

The film has a documentary style feel to it, but not too much to be bothered by it. Though the beginning has a lot of handheld camera shots, the dizzying camera is not applied throughout the whole movie, where some shots are pretty much steady to watch (thankfully! What is up with filming everything in nauseating motion! Quit it!).

PLOT:

A large alien ship stops in orbit above Johannesburg in South Africa in 1982. It is thought a command module must have fallen out (they captured something falling from the shipon camera , but what exactly isn’t sure) and that it is the reason why it stayed. Earthlings go explore, seeing for days no sign had been given from the ship. On board they find a million starving aliens in real bad shape. To treat them, they are given asylum on Earth, in District 9. But soon criminal activities and destruction follow, which is counteracted by security measures by Earth and pretty soon the camp has become a slum.

Now we are in the 21st century, the ship still in orbit, the slum containing too many prawns (nickname for the aliens) and they need to be relocated to a new camp outside of Johannesburg, District 10. This is to be done by the MNU, Multinational United, a private military corporation. The relocation is lead by field operator Wikus van de Merwe, and you guessed it, he pretty much goes into it with enthusiasm, but soon regrets ever having gotten the task…

INTERESTING TO KNOW:

The underlying theme is clearly xenophobia en social segregation. And similarities can be drawn on contemporary refugee camps. The movie is based on a short film Alive in Joburg (2005) (by the same director Neill Blomkamp and produced by the main actor in both films - and very good, I might add - Sharlto Copley) and the name District 9 is inspired by the events that took place in District Six, Cape Town, during the Apartheid. I did not know of this, and was very interested in reading about it. Another reason why I liked District 9, because it made me think and read.

OPINION:

It was nice to see lesser know actors (at least for me as a European - I don't know how known they are in South Africa or elsewhere), because it made the movie have a more realistic feel to it for me. As if it was really an event that happened (although in the future of 2010). It made the "documentary" more realistic to me.

Definitely a movie worth seeing. Sci fi fan or not.

Bande Annonce District 9 trailer 720p
FilmGeek-TV.

A French short movie (his second)by Jacques Rozier .

Zéro de conduite is a French movie by Jean Vigo.

Summer vacation comes to an end and kids need to return to boarding school, a place without much joy and where the teachers don’t need much to punish you. Or, as the title indicates, give you a zero for bad behaviour. 4 amongst them decide to rebel, which the new supervisor turns a blind eye to in order for them to succeed.

On the day of the school feast, they put their rebellion to work by turning the school into complete anarchy. With the 4 rebels on the school roof top.

It’s interesting to see movies from the thirties, where child actors seem to be more themselves than actors.

Nice little movie (it’s a short movie in all).

Worth seeing.

This is a scene taken the episode Special Squad from the BBC sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

In this scene, Laurie's eldest son, plays a cameo as a baby in which Fry and Laurie interrogate the baby about "what he's done with the stuff".

I like Fry for his documentaries and QI quiz, for his part as psychiatrist in Bones, as narrator in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe.

And I like Laurie from Blackadder, Stuart Little and very much so from House.

I just hadn't seen A Bit of Fry and Laurie before. I'm going to now, though.